When Donald Trump visited Detroit last week, he uttered a series of insults.
He compared the city, which is 77% black, to a developing country and said that “the whole country will eventually be like Detroit” if Vice President Kamala Harris wins.
If there was any doubt about whether Trump thinks this is good or bad, he quickly made it clear.
“You’re going to have a mess on your hands,” the former president said.
Trump’s comments were a continuation of a long-standing and racially charged message of trashing major Democratic-run cities. Such rhetoric was a staple of his failed 2020 re-election campaign, when he warned of crime and low-income housing encroaching on the suburbs, indulging fears that decades earlier had driven the migration of “white flight” from the inner cities .
Including Detroit, Trump has this year pointedly targeted the most populous cities in three battleground states crucial to winning the White House: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. He denigrated Philadelphia as “ridden by bloodshed and crime” and vilified Milwaukee as “terrible” before traveling there for the Republican National Convention.
As in Detroit, non-white citizens make up the majority of the population in Philadelphia and Milwaukee. Harris will campaign in all three cities this week.
Trump’s attacks risk offending swing voters who don’t share his dark view of their big cities, as well as black voters his campaign is trying to sway in what is expected to be a tight election won on the margins. But the attacks also speak to some of the prejudices and sentiments that have energized his base since his first campaign eight years ago.
“He didn’t say anything that most Trump voters in Michigan don’t say or believe about Detroit,” said Dennis Lennox, a Republican strategist who works in the state. “A lot of people from the state of Michigan probably haven’t been to Detroit in years. Their perception of the city is therefore not necessarily the reality. Detroit is without a doubt a different and better city than it was ten years ago.”
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, defended Detroit in a statement her political action committee released after Trump’s visit. She claimed that “Detroit is growing by the minute as people fall in love with this special place” and warned that “Detroiters will not forget this in November.”
Others point out the flaws in Trump’s rhetoric. Violent crime is declining nationally, including in some of the cities he often focuses on. Last year there were 252 homicides in Detroit, the fewest since 1966.
“Crime is down; factories are opening,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, said last week as he campaigned in the Detroit suburb of Warren.
In a statement accompanying this article, Trump campaign spokesman Brian Hughes said Trump is committed to “security and investment” in cities that have “had their prosperity and security attacked” by Harris and other Democratic leaders.
“Our cities have been turned into havens for illegal immigrant criminals, and America’s working men and women have had to take a backseat when it comes to public services,” Hughes added. “Movements to defund the police have left people in these urban centers behind. President Trump wants every neighborhood in every city to be restored to the greatness we once had.”
‘Playing for the suburbs’
Brad Todd, a Republican strategist who has worked on Michigan elections, said Trump is “playing for the suburbs,” where people “miss the days when downtown Detroit was great, and they think the problems are a failure of government .’
In focus groups Todd has conducted in Macomb County—the Detroit suburbs that were home to the famed “Reagan Democrats” in the 1980s—”people will complain about Detroit for an hour and then tell you they love it.”
The same dynamic is playing out in other cities that Trump has criticized.
“There are a lot of places like this,” Todd said. “It’s not everywhere [but] there are many cities where there is a lot of nostalgia for the best days of the city.”
Andrew Hitt, former chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, said Trump’s comments are unlikely to hurt him in that battleground state, which, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, he won in 2016 but lost in 2020.
Conservative-leaning voters in rural parts of the state criticize Milwaukee for a variety of reasons, Hitt said, whether it’s their perception of the high crime rate or greater resources flowing there, or their lack of personal or cultural connections to the city outside of sports.
“It won’t hurt him at all when it comes to rural voters,” Hitt said of Trump’s anti-Milwaukee comments. “But other than that, I think it helps him with suburban voters.”
Cities in general have become a handy enemy for Trump, who has focused his provocative rhetoric on other major cities, some of which are in states likely to favor Harris. He has compared Chicago — where he owns a hotel tower and where he will participate in a Bloomberg News interview Tuesday — to war-torn Afghanistan.
Other targets include New York, where he lived until establishing a Florida residence in 2019, and San Francisco, which, as the political base for Harris and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is a frequent punching bag for the Republican party has been.
All three cities have majority non-white populations.
‘It’s like living in hell’
Trump also has a history of lashing out at black members of Congress by discrediting the cities they represent. In 2017, Trump, seething over criticism from the late Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., described his Atlanta district as “in terrible shape.” In 2019, during an argument with the late Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., Trump called his Baltimore district “dangerous” and “disgusting.”
“Look at Detroit. Look what’s happening in Oakland. Look what’s happening in Baltimore,” Trump said at a Fox News town hall in 2020. “And everyone gets upset when I say it. They say, ‘Oh, is that a racist statement?’ It’s not racist. Honestly, black people come up to me and say, “Thank you. Thank you, sir, for saying so.’ They want help.”
“In these cities,” Trump added, “it’s like living in hell.”
It’s not just big cities that Trump likes to vilify. In recent weeks, he has attacked Springfield, Ohio, and Aurora, Colorado, for their immigrant communities. Trump campaigned last week in Aurora — hardly the epicenter of a swing state — and argued that the city had been overtaken by a Venezuelan prison gang. His claims, as they had in Springfield, put him at odds with local officials, including Republican Mayor Mike Coffman.
A Republican close to Trump’s campaign argued that his attacks on cities are not insults, but rather a promise to solve problems that most people living in those regions recognize.
“It’s not like he’s going to go to Detroit and attack the Detroit Pistons or the Red Wings or the Tigers,” said this person, who was not authorized to speak publicly for the campaign. “When Trump says things like this, it’s a reflection of what many people outside the media bubble who live in the state are thinking themselves.”
Victoria LaCivita, Trump’s communications director in Michigan, said in a statement that Trump “remembers when Detroit was hailed as the gold standard for success in auto manufacturing and revolutionized the auto industry.” She also cited Detroit’s population decline and high homicide and poverty rates as evidence that change is warranted.
“As President Trump emphasized in his speech, his policies will usher in a new era of economic success and stability for Detroit, allowing the city to reach its full potential,” she added.
Pursuing the black vote
Michigan was the site of Trump’s memorable 2016 appeal to black voters to support his candidacy.
“What the hell have you got to lose?” Trump cited poverty, high unemployment and schools that are “not good” in Dimondale, a mostly white town 90 miles from Detroit.
At the same event, Trump predicted that he would win more than 95% of the black vote in his 2020 re-election campaign. Exit polls that year showed him winning only 12%.
Still, Trump has talked about improving his standing among black voters in his third presidential bid, even as his policy proposals and unsubstantiated claims and suspicions about voter fraud in major urban counties could alienate them.
For example, he links the allocation of federal funding to local police departments to the reinstatement of stop-and-frisk policies, which allow officers to randomly stop and frisk people for weapons. The tactic has been criticized for disproportionately targeting black men.
Trump and his allies have also continued to raise unfounded alarms about election cheating in cities like Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, pledging to send more than 100,000 lawyers and volunteers to monitor voting in battleground states. His “terrible” comment about Milwaukee was more about “crime and voter fraud,” a campaign spokesman said at the time.
Meanwhile, a recent national NBC News poll found that Harris, the nation’s first Black vice president, led Trump 84% to 11% among Black voters — a margin comparable to President Joe Biden’s leading four years ago.
But many Democrats are concerned that black voters, and black men in particular, may be more open to supporting Trump than in the past, or less enthusiastic about voting altogether.
“We have not seen the same kind of energy and turnout across all of our neighborhoods and communities that we saw when I was running,” former President Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, told volunteers before a rally last week, according to a swimming pool report. “Now I would also like to say that this seems to be clearer with the brothers.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
